BatesLine

The cover story in this week's Urban Tulsa Weekly is a profile of Tulsa District 9 City Councilor G. T. Bynum. Reporter Mike Easterling has written an interesting story about a significant figure in Tulsa politics, and he includes extensive quotes from Jack Henderson and Rick Westcott, Bynum's colleagues from Districts 1 and 2; former Sen. Don Nickles, Bynum's first boss in Washington; and me.

As the article noted, I like G. T. personally, but I've been disappointed with many of his decisions on the council. At the same time, as I told Mike Easterling, although the point didn't make it into the story, I appreciate G.T.'s leadership on the charter change that requires the council to sign off on large lawsuit settlements and the new proposal to require the city to save money when times are flush, rather than expanding government. (That said, I still wonder why he wasn't helping Bill Martinson when Martinson was trying to get Mayor Taylor to deal forthrightly with the city's fiscal crisis last summer.)

Another admirable aspect that came out in the story is Bynum's respect for the City Council as an institution, the city's legislative body. However you may feel about the current membership of the Council at any given time, it has an important role to play in representing Tulsa's diversity, crafting legislation, and providing oversight of our city government. In the early years under our current charter, a majority of councilors seemed to see themselves as mere rubber stamps or window dressing. 2004 and the advent of the Gang of Five began to change that outlook; Dewey Bartlett has cemented the City Council's identity as an independent co-equal branch of government:

One of the great ironies of the situation, he acknowledged, is that it has unified the council like never before.

"If you look back, every mayor's had problems with councilors," he said. "Mayor Taylor had problems with some councilors, Bill LaFortune did, Susan Savage did. But none of them have had unanimous problems before. I'm hopeful that the mayor'll take that as a sign that he needs to work in a more cooperative fashion with the council. And I say that as someone who worked on his campaign and grew up looking up to him."

Also worth pondering from the story was the quote from the late Sen. Paul Coverdell that Bynum has written where he'll see it often: "If you have been given a moment here, you should not let the dust grow under you."

(Coverdell, by the way, beat an incumbent senator, Wyche Fowler, thanks to a general election runoff. The Libertarian candidate split off some of the anti-incumbent vote, and Fowler finished first at the 1992 general election, but without a majority of the vote. Under Georgia law at the time, a runoff was held three weeks later, and Coverdell won narrowly.)

Conservative parents of politically-aware young people should also take to heart what Bynum had to say about his experience as a congressional staffer:

"It was wonderful," he said of that period in his life. "For a young person interested in government, there are few things you can do that give you so much access and opportunity as working on Capitol Hill. I do encourage any young Oklahomans who are interested in government to do it.

"I think that's one of the great secrets about our government that a lot of people aren't aware of is Capitol Hill is largely staffed by people under 30 years of age because they're the only ones who'll work that cheap and that hard. And so you get a tremendous amount of responsibility, and you learn a tremendous amount. That experience was really formative for me."

On the negative side of the ledger, it was interesting to read that Bynum's support for the defeated 2007 Tulsa County sales tax increase helped him decide to seek a seat on the Council:

But there were other, more worldly factors motivating him, as well. Bynum and his wife were big supporters of the 2007 Our River Yes! campaign for a sales tax increase that would have funded $282 million in improvements to the Arkansas River, and they were not happy to see it go down in defeat.

"When it failed, I was really disappointed in the response of the leaders of the city, which seemed to me to be, 'We'll wait 10 years and then try again,'" Bynum said. "Working in the Senate, I'd known that when we had a bill that was really important and it failed, we went back to the drawing board and found what things we needed to fix in order to get the votes to win. We didn't just say, 'Oh, well, it's over, we'll try again 10 years from now.' "

Bynum characterizes the river as the biggest untapped asset in the city and believes it has the capacity to become Tulsa's biggest economic driver. Earning himself a seat on the City Council, he believed, would provide him with the chance to champion that belief.

It's hard to believe that any intelligent person would believe in the river as "Tulsa's biggest economic driver." And while Bynum talks about his libertarian leanings, it's hard to see how having government taking a bigger share of everyone's money is consistent with a libertarian perspective.

And what was libertarian about the ballpark deal, which Bynum supported? Is it libertarian to take money by force from owners of distant property who will see negligible benefit from a facility built to house a private entertainment company?

It's also hard to see what's libertarian about a city policy that will be used to penalize people for a sort of thought crime. What Bynum's non-discrimination policy amounts to is a ban on taking any notice of a major component of a person's psyche and character. When Bynum says that sexual orientation "has nothing to do with job performance," he's effectively saying that it never has anything to do with job performance under any circumstances, a view that is not universally shared but which, thanks to Bynum's leadership, is now universally imposed.

(My blog entries at the time explain in more detail why I feel Bynum "didn't really understand the issue from a conservative perspective" and seemed to ignore the long-range consequences of the decision: G. T. Bynum's sexual orientation proposal, Bynum gay proposition on council agenda tonight.)

I seem to recall that, when he spoke to the conservative Tulsa Area Republican Assembly back in 2008, when he was running for office, he used the word conservative a lot, and talked about his work for Sen. Coburn. I don't recall him making any use of the word libertarian.

Regarding Bynum's new lobbying business, Easterling writes that I "described [the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF)] as Bynum's biggest client." That's true, but I didn't leave it to opinion or speculation. I pointed the UTW reporter to the Senate Office of Public Responsibility's Lobbying Disclosure Act database, which shows that G. T. Bynum Consulting, LLC, reported $30,000 in lobbying income for the first and second quarters of 2010, and $20,000 from Williams and Williams (Bynum's former employer) over the same period. (Over the entire length of Bynum's lobbying career, the two are currently tied; Bynum began lobbying for Williams and Williams in the 4th quarter of 2009.)

To clarify my concern about Bynum representing GKFF as a lobbyist and serving on the City Council: GKFF is actively engaged in civic and governmental issues here in Tulsa, as are closely related individuals and entities. George Kaiser is a significant political donor in local elections, as is the BOK Financial Political Action Committee. Kaiser and GKFF were heavily involved in the 2007 Tulsa County sales tax increase for river improvements and in the downtown Drillers stadium deal, to name two recent examples of their engagement in local political issues. I cannot think of another example of an elected official at one level of government simultaneously serving as a lobbyist at another level of government. It would be a different matter if Bynum limited his lobbying practice to organizations and businesses that had no interest in City Hall affairs.

By the way, Bynum's 2010 second quarter disclosure form reveals that the job he created -- the other lobbyist he hired -- is Stuart McCalman, who was Governmental Affairs Director under Mayor Kathy Taylor, and who continued in that role under Bartlett, until his involvement in the Mayor/Council dispute over the JAG grant and police layoffs.

FLASHBACK: G. T. Bynum's statements on the ballpark assessment district in 2008, with commentary by Steven Roemerman.

I was playing Uno this evening with my four-and-a-half-year-old. Spiderman Uno, with the Spider Sense card that lets you see one other player's cards before deciding on the new color.

I won the first hand. (Bad daddy.) Little Bit's lower lip started trembling, and he starting getting sniffly. He said something I couldn't quite make out in a teary voice, and he excused himself to his room for about half a minute to collect himself.

The next hand I lost. (Good daddy.) Midway through the third hand, he exclaimed with a grin, "I love this game!"

"Even when you don't win?" I asked.

He replied, nonchalantly, "I didn't mean to cry. It was myself that made me cry." He shrugged. "Why did my body think of that?"

Kohl's is running a contest via Facebook, the Kohl's Cares for Kids $10M Giveback Contest. From now until Friday, September 3, 2010, you can vote up to five times each for your favorite school. (You have 20 votes total.) The top twenty schools nationwide will be awarded $500,000 each.

I spent 10 of my votes on two schools that already do great work and could do even more with a half-million dollars. One of them, the Little Light House, here in Tulsa, is currently ranked 29th, the only Oklahoma school in the top 100.

The Little Light House has been around since 1972, working with "children, from Birth to the chronological age of six, with a wide range of physically and mentally challenging conditions," helping them to get the best possible start to reaching their full potential. The school was an early recipient of Pres. George H. W. Bush's "Points of Light" award.

The Little Light House uses a trans-disciplinary team approach to provide highly individualized services to each student. Parents, teachers and therapists from the various arenas make up this important team which establishes each child's individual measurable goals and objectives for the year. Volunteers assist the professional staff to provide the highest degree of individual attention to each child possible.

Right now the school has a long waiting list. $500,000 could be a big boost to their ability to expand.

If you're a Facebook member, please take a minute to cast five votes for the Little Light House.

And while you're at it, I'd appreciate it if you'd cast some of your remaining 15 votes for a school near and dear to my heart, a school with a challenging classical curriculum, a strong drama program, and great school spirit, Tulsa's Augustine Christian Academy:

On Right Wing News, John Hawkins has posted a first-hand report with lots of photos from the Defending the American Dream Summit (organized by Americans for Prosperity) and the Restoring Honor rally, held last weekend in Washington, D. C. There were huge crowds at both events (although the rally on the Mall was a couple of orders of magnitude bigger).

Wichita blogger Bob Weeks was at the AfP event and has reports on speeches by Dick Morris and George Will. Morris spoke about the challenges conservatives will face when Republicans take back Congress this November:

First, we have to make sure the people we elect based on pledges to reduce spending keep their word.

Then, the states will come begging to Washington for a bailout. We need to say no, Morris told the audience. States should have a way to declare bankruptcy and get out from under public sector union contracts.

Will had interesting things to say about a variety of topics:

On education, he said we need an education system that "equips people to compete in a free society." He criticized the short school year in the U.S., as compared to other countries. He told the audience that a major problem with schools is the teachers unions. The increased spending on schools has not worked. 90 percent of the difference between schools can be explained by characteristics of the students' families, he said. "Don't tell me the pupil-teacher ratio, tell me the parent-pupil ratio."

Even with as many problems as there are, he said that an "aroused citizenry" like that in the room tonight can fix the problems. He's not pessimistic, he said, because Obama has stimulated a "new clarity" from the American people.

There is a tension today between freedom and equality, two polar values. Liberals today stress equality of outcomes, and believe that the multiplication of entitlement programs to produce this equality serves the public good. But conservatives stress freedom, and that multiplication of entitlement programs is "subversive of the attitudes and aptitudes essential for a free society of self-reliant, far-sighted, thrifty and industrious people."

Will quoted Winston Churchill: "The American people invariably do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives."

C-SPAN has video of the Restoring Honor rally, featuring speeches by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. St. Louis Cardinals fans should note that manager Tony LaRussa took the stage to introduce first baseman Albert Pujols, who received an award for his charitable work.

Big Journalism has an item on the crowd estimates for the rally and an aerial photo taken from the top of the Washington Monument.

Some links around the Oklahoma blogosphere:

Brit Gal in the USA is now an American gal in the USA. Congratulations, Sarah! In an earlier blog entry, she writes about her emotions in the days leading up to the citizenship ceremony. And despite living in western Oklahoma for nearly five years, there are aspects of life here that she finds exotic.

Laurel Kane, owner of Afton Station on Route 66, had a surprise visit from a local car collector who also happens to be a country music legend.

A sports promoter wants to bring a LeMans Grand Prix race to the streets of downtown Oklahoma City, and Mayor Mick Cornett is all a-flutter with the prospect, despite a city staff finding that street Grand Prix racing in the US has "a documented record of poor sustainability." In a sidebar, Oklahoman reporter Steve Lackmeyer notes a potential conflict between city plans to improve the downtown pedestrian experience and the requirements of a high-speed race.

A report by the city's special projects manager, Tom Anderson, advises city leaders may have to decide between Project 180 and the race as part of their deliberation. The course would likely require elimination of medians along E.K. Gaylord between Reno and NW 4 and Robinson between Reno and Robert S. Kerr. Such medians were strongly recommended as a means to make downtown friendlier for pedestrians in a report compiled last year by consultant Jeff Speck.

And on his OKC Central blog, Lackmeyer writes about controversy over the location of Oklahoma City's proposed new convention center, which will be funded by the MAPS 3 tax. What's notable is that OKCitians who had a great deal of confidence in the city's handling of previous MAPS programs are starting to get some heartburn over the lack of transparency this time around.

In the comments, Doug Loudenback links to a Scott Cooper story in the latest Oklahoma Gazette on the convention center controversy and the surprise discovery that there is $30 million in the MAPS 3 convention center budget to relocate an electric company substation:

While the situation with the substation was known before MAPS 3 was put together during Core to Shore, the mayor said the estimated cost -- $30 million -- was not calculated until days before calling the election.

"The issue was, do we take that $30-million figure and create sort of a ninth initiative? In other words, do we have an OG&E initiative as part of it?" Cornett said. "That didn't seem to fall in line with what we had done with MAPS or MAPS for Kids. Because the convention center -- or more specifically, the convention center hotel according to the Core to Shore plan -- might sit on that site, I made the decision to put that into the convention center budget and increase it from $250 million to $280 million."

The mayor said he informed the City Council and the chamber of his decision and built a consensus for the proposal.

But the $30 million for the substation can't be found in any MAPS 3 campaign literature. Very little public discussion occurred on the matter, leaving the public in the dark.

The Gazette story has links to two studies (by Urban Land Institute and HOK) that make recommendations for the convention center location which are at odds with Cornett's apparent preference.

As I've lost a couple of lengthy entries to a bug in the very old version of blog software that runs this site, I've decided to upgrade to a newer version before trying to add any more content. I'm hopeful that it will be a smooth transition. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: New version installed, and everything seems to be working.

FURTHER UPDATE: Well, no, everything isn't working. There are some very strange things going on with the CMS software.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Found the problem. New static directory needed to be copied to the right place.

Back in the 1990s, companies spent billions correcting the Y2K bug, and many worried that mass chaos would ensue when buggy software failed on 1/1/2000, disrupting banking systems, financial markets, power grids, and food distribution. Many believed the best way to ride out the impending crisis was rural self-sufficiency: enough land to grow your own food, in a defensible location far from rioting city-dwellers.

As it happened, Y2K had no significant effect, beyond boosting income for software engineers and freeze-dried food suppliers. We never got a chance to find out whether the city or country would have fared better in the complete breakdown of Western Civilization.

Dmitri Orlov, who lived through the collapse of the old Soviet Union, believes that the same factors are in place for the collapse of his adopted homeland, the USA:

The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. I call this particular list of ingredients "The Superpower Collapse Soup." Other factors, such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality.

That link is to the text of a speech by Orlov, "Social Collapse Best Practices," and it's thought-provoking. (It's also filled with that peculiarly Russian gallows humor.) If our current societal arrangement is a house of cards, how can I prepare now for the transition to a new, more stable, more sustainable arrangement?

In one section, Orlov describes the advantages of overcrowded Soviet cities over sprawling American suburbia for dealing with social collapse:

These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable. With several generations living together, families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children's time to do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable.... Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren't strangers, and who could keep an eye on things....

But there is no reason at all to think that a suburban single-family house is in any sense a requirement. It is little more than a cultural preference, and a very shortsighted one at that. Most suburban houses are expensive to heat and cool, inaccessible by public transportation, expensive to hook up to public utilities because of the long runs of pipe and cable, and require a great deal of additional public expenditure on road, bridge and highway maintenance, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable agricultural land. They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of urban environments, causing a proliferation of dead downtowns. Many families that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them, and expect others to bail them out.

As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned, it will also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities will not have the funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity, road and bridge repair, and police. Without cheap and plentiful gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, many suburban dwellings will become both inaccessible and unlivable. The inevitable result will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the more survivable, more densely settled towns and cities. The luckier ones will find friends or family to stay with; for the rest, it would be very helpful to improvise some solution.

One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is quite straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture, and all they are really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the current large population of office plankton. The businesses that once occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and better uses for them.

Another potential home for suburban refugees: The college campus, once the higher-ed bubble has popped:

College campuses make perfect community centers: there are dormitories for newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the more settled residents, and plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a variety of uses. A college campus normally contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed to grow food, or, at the very least, hay, and to graze cattle. Perhaps some enlightened administrators, trustees and faculty members will fall upon this idea once they see admissions flat-lining and endowments dropping to zero, without any need for government involvement. So here we have a ray of hope, don't we.

Self-sufficiency in the countryside sounds plausible, but in the event of a new Dark Ages, people will need to develop new ways to feed, clothe, protect, and move themselves. To do that efficiently requires cooperation, organization, and division of labor, and that means having lots of people at hand with variety of skills and knowledge.

The hopeful note in Orlov's talk is that human beings are resilient, even those who have been beaten down by totalitarianism for eighty years. I'd like to think that the USA, with its long history of voluntary organizations (Burke's "little platoons"), would fare even better than the resilient Russians.

Hat tip to Little Miss Attila for the link to Orlov's talk.

UPDATE: midnight, 2010/08/25. Nearly 120,000 Oklahoma Republicans voted in the runoff, and 70% of them voted for John Doak. Congratulations to Mr. Doak and the Oklahoma GOP. This year's turnout is only slightly lower than the 2006 runoff, which was dominated by the high-profile, expensive and fierce runoff for Lt. Governor between Scott Pruitt and Todd Hiett.

(Turnout was up almost 10% in the 5th Congressional District runoff. About 42,000 voted in the 2006 runoff between Mary Fallin and Mick Cornett, while about 46,000 voted in this year's James Lankford vs. Kevin Calvey bout. Fallin beat Cornett 63-37. Lankford beat Calvey 65-35.)

There's always the danger, in a minor election especially, that people will vote for someone with a familiar name. That's a problem if the name is familiar for the wrong reasons. How else can you explain a first place primary finish for John Crawford, the former Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner who was the subject of a federal corruption investigation.

James L. Harlin (FSA, CLU, ChFC, FLMI, MAAA) was an informant to the FBI during its investigation of John P. Crawford during his term as Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner from 1995 to 1999. Last week, Harlin spoke to the Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee (OCPAC). Charlie Meadows, OCPAC chairman, sent Harlin's statement out to his email list. (If you'd like to subscribe to the OCPAC's weekly email newsletter, send a note to Mr. Meadows at charliemeadows7 at gmail dot com.)

Harlin alleges that Crawford, as Mid-Continent Life actuary, created an actuarially unsound insurance product, then, as Insurance Commissioner, interfered with the sale of the company, abused his power to seize the company, destroyed the company and hundreds of Oklahoma jobs, and deterred other investment in Oklahoma by an outside company; Crawford's official actions, according to Harlin, convinced them that Oklahoma was a corrupt backwater of cronyism.

Oklahoma Republicans need to show up at the polls today, August 24, 2010, and vote for John Doak for Insurance Commissioner. Doak has strong industry experience, is a conservative, and has a sterling reputation. He will be a strong standard-bearer in the November election. Crawford's name on the ballot would not only kill our chances of having a pro-life, anti-Obamacare Insurance Commissioner, but it's likely to stain the entire Republican ticket.

Here is Mr. Harlin's statement:

John Crawford & Mid-Continent Life August 18, 2010

Purpose

To share my direct experience with John Crawford when he was Insurance Commissioner. To defeat Crawford in the primary runoff August 24 because there is a strong chance that the Republican nominee will become the next commissioner.

Opening

There are numerous examples of John Crawford's incompetence, cronyism and corruption. These include his weak credentials as an actuary, channeling money to his son in a dubious technology scheme, having his chief of staff raise campaign funds while on the payroll of a company he illegally seized, FBI investigations, etc.

MCL

However, I want to focus on Mid-Continent Life Insurance Company. MCL was the oldest insurance company incorporated in the State of Oklahoma and was formed by the Stewart family around the time of Statehood.

MCL operated successfully for over 70 years in the traditional life insurance business.

In the late 70's a group of MCL managers designed a new product called "Extra Life" that tried to take advantage of the hyperinflation and inordinately high interest rates caused by the financial mayhem created by the Carter administration. That mayhem is being repeated today by Obama... but that's a story for another day.

The actuary for MCL at the time this product was created was John Crawford. He certified the financial strength of the company, the integrity of the dividends, and the pricing of the products. He did this certification every single year up until 1986. He did this even though the economic circumstances changed during the Regan years to the point that the dividends and the pricing of the product were no longer sustainable.

In 1987, Florida Power bought MCL. Seeing Florida Power's financial resources, Crawford decided to increase his fees tenfold. At this point Crawford was summarily fired.

In the early 90's Crawford ran as a Democrat for congress (I remember meeting Crawford at the park in Crescent on the fourth of July when he was running) and lost. In 1994 he switched parties and rode in on the coattails of Gov. Keating to become the insurance commissioner.

A new management team arrived at MCL in 1995, 18 years after the "Extra Life" product was launched. Within 3 months this new management team discovered the problem of unsustainable dividends and pricing in the product. The management team laid out a course of action to correct the problems in order to maintain the solvency of the company. In 1996 the point was reached of needing to cut the dividends and raise the rates. This plan was contractually allowed within the provisions of the policy and was later judged by the court to be the proper course of action.

In early 1997, as a standard of protocol, the management team presented the plan to Crawford in a confidential meeting. Four days later MCL's President received a solicitation along with an offer of a bribe from a friend of Crawford's to channel the company to him (the friend) in conjunction with Crawford's support. The MCL President refused and reported the incident to Florida Power officials.

Two months later, Crawford abused his power as commissioner to seize the company. He demanded that Florida Power pay millions of dollars to cover up the financial shortfall that he had mishandled when he was the company actuary. Statements from people at the time of his firing showed this was Crawford's way of getting retribution against Florida Power.

Crawford removed the entire MCL management team and proceeded to try to prosecute them and their lawyers even though none of them designed the product or certified to the financial integrity of the company for the nearly two decades prior to their arrival. That prosecution was ultimately dismissed for lack of evidence.

Each member of the MCL management team went on to establish very successful careers. The President became the Chairman, President & CEO of Chase Insurance, the largest bank insurance enterprise in America. MCL's general Counsel became the General Counsel for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. He now oversees the legal framework for the entire U.S. insurance industry for every state in the country. The Chief Actuary is now the Chief Actuary of the largest TPA in America. The Chief Financial Officer became the CFO of a large Oklahoma company. The marketing officer became the President of several international insurance companies. This was a superb management team with outstanding credentials and an impeccable record of performance excellence.

Because of John Crawford, MCL no longer exists. Hundreds of Oklahoma jobs were lost. The insurance industry considers Oklahoma a "backwater" for doing business. Florida Power had an opportunity to invest $500 million in a power related industry in Oklahoma. They passed on this investment because of their treatment by Crawford and his cronies. The MCL President had first-hand knowledge that Florida Power shared their dim view of Oklahoma with many of their Fortune 500 friends.

So bottom line, all the headlines of corruption, cronyism and incompetence surrounding John Crawford are vividly real. Oklahoma consumers, the insurance industry, and Oklahoma businesses cannot afford a repeat of Crawford as Insurance Commissioner.

It is imperative to defeat Crawford in this primary runoff on August 24.

Here are Charlie Meadows's comments on the Doak-Crawford runoff:

John Doak has a great deal of experience in a variety of levels in the insurance industry. He is a solid conservative and I believe a man of high moral character and integrity which is a most important qualification for this office. The insurance commissioner has enormous regulatory powers over both small and very large businesses and as such the person must be above reproach. I believe his opponent, John Crawford to be corrupt, a charlatan and an opportunist. He was the first Republican elected to this position on the coat-tails of Frank Keating's election to governor. During his one term in office, before voters sent him packing in 1998, his office was under numerous allegations of fraud, nepotism, mismanagement and corruption.

The liberal Democrat Incumbent Kim Holland really wants John Crawford to become the nominee as she will have a field day bringing up all those very serious allegations from the past. She will have a difficult time defeating John Doak, but Crawford is so bad, I will even vote for Holland over Crawford if he is the nominee as the Republican party can not afford to put a suspected crook in office with a "R" by his name.

For all Oklahoma Republicans and for some Democrats around the state, there's a runoff election next Tuesday, August 24, 2010. Early voting at county election boards across the state began on Friday and continues Saturday, August 21, 2010, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Monday, August 23, 2010, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The runoff is to decide party nominees following a primary in which no candidate received 50% of the vote. There are only 11 nominations for federal, statewide, and legislative offices to be decided on Tuesday. (Runoffs for non-partisan judicial races will be held in November.)

Republican runoffs:

U. S. House District 2: Daniel Edmonds, Charles Thompson
U. S. House District 5: Kevin Calvey, James Lankford
Insurance Commissioner: John Doak, John Crawford
State Senate District 44: Ralph Shortey, James Davenport
State House District 27: Josh Cockroft, Richard Bennett
State House District 100: Elise Hall, David Looby

Democrat runoffs:

State House District 3: James Lockhart, Matt Webb
State House District 18: Carolyn McNatt Hill, Donnie Condit
State House District 21: Jerry Tomlinson, Nathan W. Williams
State House District 66: Eli Potts, Andrew Thomas Williams
State House District 86: John Auffet, William T. Will Fourkiller

The only runoffs for Tulsa County voters are for the Republican nomination for Insurance Commissioner and the Democrat nomination for HD 66.

I'm supporting John Doak for Insurance Commissioner, and I urge my fellow Republicans to do the same. Doak, a Tulsan, has been an insurance agent and an insurance executive, in the business since graduating from OU in 1988. Doak has been endorsed by many prominent Oklahoma Republicans, including former Sen. Don Nickles, State Sen. Randy Brogdon, Tulsa County Assessor Ken Yazel, and Corporation Commissioner Dana Murphy, who writes:

The office of Insurance Commissioner is extremely important to our state. The Republican Party and the citizens of Oklahoma are best served with John Doak, who is passionately pro-life, as our nominee. He has joined a federal lawsuit against Obama Care and is the insurance commissioner candidate who best represents Oklahoma values. Through John Doak's experience with his daughter, who is the survivor of three open-heart surgeries, as well as his outstanding professional experience in the insurance industry as both an agent and executive, I believe he truly understands consumers' needs as well as the business aspects of the insurance industry.

Here's Doak speaking at the Muskogee Tea Party Voter Education Rally on July 2:

And an ad that aired before the July primary:

I heard Doak speak at the candidate forum sponsored by the USA Patriots. He was a very impressive and dynamic speaker, and he won over the audience.

Doak's opponent is John Crawford. Crawford was elected Insurance Commissioner in 1994 but was narrowly defeated for re-election in 1998 by Carroll Fisher, who left his own personal stain on the office.

Crawford's final year in office was overshadowed by a Federal investigation into whether he misused his office to the benefit of a company connected with his son:

In 1998 the Daily Oklahoman reported Crawford was the target of an FBI investigation into alleged fraud and nepotism regarding computer contracts he awarded on behalf of Enid-based insurance company American Standard Life & Accident Co. The FBI probe focused on allegations Crawford's son, the late John P. Crawford III, profited from the contract.

American Standard Life was declared insolvent and placed in receivership in 1991. When Crawford became insurance commissioner in 1995, he became responsible for either the rehabilitation or dissolution of the Enid insurance company. The liquidation of American Standard was ordered in October 1997 in Oklahoma County District Court.

In 1995, while under Crawford's control, American Standard allegedly entered into a $60,000 contract with a Nevada firm, Advanced Computer Technology Inc., a company whose registered agent was "John P. Crawford," the Oklahoman reported.

The investigation was dropped without charges against Crawford. Key Insurance Commission documents regarding the contract had gone missing, and John P. Crawford III committed suicide in January 1998.

Crawford jumped into the 2010 campaign on the last day of filing, apparently with no previous announcement of his intention to run. Crawford reused a 1998 TV ad featuring a general election endorsement from Jim Inhofe. While the ad's run on Cox Cable may have been a mistake, blogger Jamison Faught has his doubts:

While this may be the case, it does not explain why the Crawford campaign knowingly placed the ad on YouTube and on his website. A Cox employee might have mistakenly aired the wrong commercial, but they could not have edited his website. In addition, the ad was re-worked to include a "paid for by" disclaimer reflecting his 2010 account, so some work had to have been done on the ad before running it, and I find it hard to believe that Cox did not ask for approval on the re-worked edition.

Right before the primary, I received a couple of strange form letters in support of Crawford, similar in appearance to one another, one from a gun rights group that I'd never heard of (signed by political consultant Kirk Shelley) and one from an individual I'd never heard of. It made me wonder just who is in the shadows backing Crawford's run.

The person who will most benefit if Crawford wins the runoff: incumbent Insurance Commissioner Kim Holland, a Democrat from Tulsa. Many Republicans would have difficulty backing Crawford because of the questions about his stewardship of the office, and you can expect that Holland's campaign and the media will call attention to Crawford's history.

In John Doak, we have a Republican candidate for Insurance Commissioner with a truly squeaky clean record, a long history in the insurance business, and the energy and message to win the office in Novermber. Please join me in voting for John "Okie" Doak.